Robert Hass on the power of poetry

My shorthand goes like this—Wordsworth read a
German philosopher who wrote about mountains,
Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau,
Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and so we got
Yellowstone and Yosemite. It took 100 years—
that’s the cycle of things.

- Robert Hassvia, via Poetry Foundation

Dear City of Maysville...

I live downtown. I really enjoy living downtown and would like to thank you for all the extra perks you've provided those of us who do live downtown. You've really outdone yourself. This past Christmas season in particular, with all the decorations and lights, made it a wonderful holiday atmosphere, and for that I say thanks.

I was caught charmed one day a few weeks past when I woke to the sound of Christmas music wafting through my windows. Thinking it an odd time for carolers, I rushed to the windows and looked out. It was then that I noticed there were no carolers; Instead there were tiny, but apparently effective loudspeakers perched upon the lamp posts. What a nice touch, I thought, and listened to some old Christmas favorites while I sipped my morning coffee. It warmed my heart to hear the songs of yore and, yes, I was caught in the spirit of Christmas. Job well done. I could imagine holiday shoppers enjoying the sounds of the season as well and thought, what a great time of the year! What other town in the country has Christmas music piped into the streets?

As the weeks rolled on and that good ol' Christmas music played day and night, and day and night, and day and night, I grew accustomed to it. Sure, I heard the exact same song played twenty times daily. Sure I heard it twenty times more as each artist's remake was played right along with the original. It's Christmas and it's festive, so it was no inconvenience at all that I had to turn my television up a few notches to drown it out. Besides, it was a lot better than the usual train whistles at one in the morning, or that crazy guy who feels it is absolutely necessary to honk his horn repeatedly as he drives home from the bar each night. It's all in the spirit of Christmas, and though I heard the same song over and over and over and over again, maybe some kid out there was hearing it for the first time, like I did when I was a kid, and maybe this Christmas season would set the tone for all the seasons to come.

Merry Christmas Maysville and thank you for the six hundred plus hours of carols you provided me to make it that much more festive!

Now that it is 1 a.m. two days after Christmas, I was wondering if you could kindly pull the plug on the artificial street music? At some point several hours ago, while I was tossing uneasily and dreaming of silver bells on every street corner, every-single-street-corner-over-and-over, in the form of tiny but apparently effective loudspeakers, the Christmas music was somehow replaced by one of those soft popular music radio stations where they sing depressing love songs over and over again, and over and over again. Sure they sound somewhat different, and are sung by different artists, but come on, aren't they all just one single song played twenty-four hours straight?

Statistically speaking the holiday season has a higher rate of depression and suicide. Some psychologists believe that this is due to the lack of sunlight during the winter. That may be true, but I now believe that it is in at least some way related to Lionel Richie.

Dear Maysville, please stop playing Lionel Richie over and over through my bedroom window. I really can't take that much more of it. Even my dog seems depressed, and my dog usually needs Prosac to calm down. Honestly, I stopped listening to Lionel Richie years ago when as a kid I realized all of his depressing love songs were all about the same thing, some sort of true love that he appeared to sing about with sincerity. I stopped believing in the sincerity of Lionel Richie when I saw him on MTV singing about everlasting love to a different girl in each video. To my impressionable young mind, "everlasting" came to mean when the "album sales ran out". Ask my old girlfriends, Lionel Richie did some serious psychological damage to me. Please Maysville, I don't want to be electrocuted cutting the wires on a lamp post, but you leave me little choice. I was passing the hair treatment section of Walmart tonight and cringed at images of Jheri Curl mullets.

In the very least, can you put the Christmas carols back on? Mr. Scrooge gives good advice: "I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year." I'm with him on that. We should totally start by playing Christmas bells again instead of pop music. Gimme back my Saint Nicholas. I need some St. Nick cause Nicole, as in Richie, is sounding more and more like the spawn of Satan as each hour passes into the night.

Very truly yours,

Devoted Resident

Why I believe in Santa Claus

In 1897 the now famous "Yes Virginia There Is A Santa Claus" editorial was published in the New York Sun. This is my interpretation.

I believe in Santa Claus because I believe in black holes. True, the two seem to have very little in common. One's a big black hole. The other is a fat guy with a white beard. One is a region of space that is so dense even light can't escape it's gravitational pull. The other has eight tiny reindeer that apparently defy the gravity all the time. One eats the stars around it. The other eats milk and cookies. Yes, black holes and Santa Claus don't really have that much in common with each other. They do, however, share the following: No one's ever seen either. Both exist.

No one has ever seen a black hole. In order for us to see an object, something must radiate from it, usually light. Because the gravitational pull of a black hole is so powerful, nothing escapes it, not even light (hence it being black). Scientists only know black holes exist – with absolute certainty – because of the effect it has on the objects surrounding it. Once an object passes in close proximity to the black hole, all possible paths lead into the hole. Thus you can measure the existence of the black hole because you can see the effects it has on other objects. It's objective. It's real.

When Dr. Philip O’Hanlon's eight-year-old daughter, Virginia, asked him whether Santa Claus really existed he told her to write to the New York Sun, a prominent New York City newspaper at the time. So she did. She wrote, "Papa says if you see it in The Sun it's so. Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?" One of the paper’s editors, Francis Pharcellus Church, replied (in part) "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy... You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus."

Church wasn't trying to suggest that Santa is physically real, only that Santa is real in terms of an effect on the world created by the idea of him. This reality is caused by having someone so generous in the minds of people every Christmas, that he becomes real. This nonphysical reality of poetry and romance becomes objective changes in how people physically act. Santa Claus radiates into people's hearts and minds, and they are in turn kinder, generous and more Santa-like. Santa, physical or not, inspires people, and thus there is a real measurable effect.You don't get the same kind of result with other folkloric heroes such as the Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy. They inspire very little. Santa Claus, on the other hand, is a tangible role model. Because the effect is real, the cause is real.

Like black holes that have never been seen, but effects other things, Santa Claus is definitely real.

Merry Christmas everyone!

A learning computer

"My CPU is a neural net, a learning computer" - Terminator

I've written before about how the Web is a vast brainlike structure that we, just by participating, are programming into the first viable artificial intelligence through depth-linking of ideas. Check out this diagram of the central backbone of the Internet. It certainly looks like a brain.

From Maysville, Episode 14

'Nother episode of "From Maysville". In this episode, we rock! as we visit the newly opened Village Music Supply and hang out with the band members of Junebug. I make a sad performance of playing a few instruments including the obligatory cowbell. Check it out!

So you're a web junky? Well, I'm your dealer

I saw this on the web and realized it's true. There are a great deal of similarities between software developers and drug dealers.

Drug Dealers	Software Developers
Refer to their clients as "users".	Refer to their clients as "users".
"The first one's free!"	"Download a free trial version..."
Have important Asian connections.	Have important Asian connections.
Strange jargon: "Stick" "Rock" "Wrap" "E" "Stash" "Drive-by" "Hit (LSD)" "Source" "The Pigs"	Strange jargon: "SCSI" "RTFM" "Packet" "C" "Cache" "CTRL ALT DEL" "Hit (WWW)" "Source-code" "Microsoft"
Realize that there's tons of cash in the 14- to 25-year-old market.	Realize that there's tons of cash in the 14- to 25-year-old market.
Clients really like your stuff when it works. When it doesn't work they want to kill you.	Clients really like your stuff when it works. When it doesn't work they want to kill you.
Job is assisted by the industry's producing newer, more potent product.	Job is assisted by the industry's producing newer, more potent products.
Often seen in the company of pimps, hustlers and low-lifes.	Often seen in the company of marketing people, venture capitalists and fund managers, ie. low-lifes.
When things go wrong, a "fix" is just a phone call away, but may be expensive.	When things go wrong, a "fix" is just a phone call away, but may be expensive.
A lot of people are getting rich while still teenagers.	A lot of people are getting rich while still teenagers.
Product causes unhealthy addictions	World of Warcraft, Everquest, stupid Flash games...
Do your job well and you can sleep with sexy movie stars who depend on you.	Damn! DAMN!!!

Turn right at the intersection

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

-- Robert Frost

It is amazing what a seemingly indifferent choice can make. According to a recent article in the New York Times, last year UPS experimented with limiting the amount of left-hand-turns its drivers make when delivering packages. Though the difference between turning right or left at a fork in the road may not seem all that important, smart folks at UPS realized that left-hand-turns typically involves waiting for traffic lights to turn and vehicles to make their way through the intersection. Plus, the actual few feet extra distance it takes to make a left turn versus a right turn can add up, especially if you're UPS.

They fed the "no-left-turn" criteria into their package flow software and created new routes for their drivers. The result — the software helped the company shave 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas and has reduced CO2 emissions by 31,000 metric tons.

Thirty-two candles

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me...

I was talking to my three-years younger brother on his birthday back in February and he described to me the exact moment he realized he had made the transition from youthful bliss to "something else". He had gone with some friends to a Rocky Horror Picture Show, you know one of those places where everyone dresses up like their favorite character from the movie and participates. Well, a few members of the audience decided to get up on stage and act out the parts, a typical part of the show. This one chick decided to be Janet, and reportedly she was right on cue. Off came her shirt in tandem with Susan Sarandon on screen. Thing is, she wasn't wearing a bra... My then twenty-seven year old younger brother's thinking went in this order: "Cool!" to "Isn't this illegal?" and finally "Is she even eighteen?"

Ah, yes, birthdays. The yearly reminder that if you're having a good time it's probably illegal, and that the girl you think is hot... well, she's probably too young for you.

Is realism dead?

Actually, the question is based on an article in Newsweek titled, "Is Photography Dead?"

Yet wandering the galleries of these two shows, you can't help but wonder if the entire medium hasn't fractured itself beyond all recognition. Sculpture did the same thing a while back, so that now "sculpture" can indicate a hole in the ground as readily as a bronze statue. Digitalization has made much of art photography's vast variety possible. But it's also a major reason that, 25 years after the technology exploded what photography could do and be, the medium seems to have lost its soul. Film photography's artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera. A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a Photoshop fairy tale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality. By now, we've witnessed all the magical morphing and seen all the clever tricks that have turned so many photographers—formerly bearers of truth—into conjurers of fiction. It's hard to say "gee whiz" anymore.

Of course photography the medium is still around, and prominent; what the article is pointing out is that it's lost it's realism. Is realism dead?

If so, it's been dying for a long time. Art as representational or imitative is the simplest and oldest view of what art is all about. Plato talked about this view of art in The Republic, using the example of a bed. A painting of a bed is a copy of a concrete bed (which is itself a copy of the ideal Form of a bed). Both Plato and Aristotle referred to the representation of nature through art as mimesis. Though later art became increasingly less and less "real," it was still meant to be representative of something real, just less concrete (instead of a concrete bed, an abstract thought or emotion for example). The Form is what's become increasingly removed from something more concretely familiar. A realistic Da Vinci eventually becomes an abstract Rothko.

Photography is broadly used here, meant to include other realism mediums as well, like film and video in which the outside world is exactly reproduced before any manipulation occurs. Photography as an artisitic medium, one in which concrete realism is a given (point and shoot), was perhaps the last hold out in which an imitative depiction of familiar reality mattered. What's left is still real; it's just not your present obvious real.

Unfortunately technology hasn't gotten around to offering new "real" representative mediums (where's my holodeck already?), so maybe realism is dead. In the least, it's definitely comatose for the time being, awaiting technology to catch up and provide us something new to manipulate.